The village of Cintra lies in one of the folds of the great hill, at perhaps a third of its height up the side: a little Swiss-looking pleasure-town round an open praça, like a set scene upon a stage. A few hotels and shops, a church, the inevitable big stone building at the most conspicuous corner, with the heavily barred windows on the level of the footpath, and the squalid prisoners begging and bandying repartee with the passers-by: at one end of the praça, a lovely ancient Manueline cross upon a palm-shaded mound, at the base of which a picturesque group is usually lounging, and close by, the courtyard of an old, old palace whose most conspicuous features are two curious protruberances from the roof, looking like a cross between Kentish oast-houses, and giant champagne bottles. This is Cintra as seen from its central point, but over it all there towers that which gives unique distinction to its otherwise somewhat trite, self-conscious picturesqueness. Sheer aloft upon a precipice a thousand feet and more above its roofs there stretch the mighty battlements and massive keeps of a huge castle of fawn-coloured stone, a castle so immense as to dwarf Thomar, Leiria, and even Obidos almost to insignificance. Long lines of crenellated walls following the dips and sinuosities of the crest of the peak appear to grow out of the mighty rounded boulders; some of these great masses of rock seeming to hang over perilously—as they must have done for thousands of years—top-heavy and threatening. [Illustration: THE OLD PALACE, CINTRA.]